Instead he phoned Wiklander, who had already been there and was not completely incapable as a police officer.
“I’m home,” said Johansson. “I want to talk with you. You’ll get a cup of coffee.”
Fifteen minutes later he and Wiklander were sitting in Johansson’s living room, each with a mug of freshly brewed coffee. He had closed the door to his study.
“There’s one thing I’m wondering about,” said Johansson, sniffing the steam rising up from the mug.
Wiklander contented himself with nodding. What is it he knows that I don’t know? he thought.
“That evening when Krassner jumped out the window,” Johansson continued, “how many of them were living on that corridor?”
“Seven, including Krassner,” said Wiklander. “Normally there would have been eight but one seems to have moved home. There was some relative who had suffered an accident. His father, I think. Or maybe it was his mother?”
“How many of them were at home?” said Johansson. “When he jumped, I mean.”
“At home,” said Wiklander, looking as though he was thinking intently. “Krassner himself was out on the town of course. He came home around seven. That black guy must have run into him when he was on his way out. I have the idea that there’s something about that in the investigation. Yes. So there was him, the black guy, M’Boye, who was on his way to the restaurant to meet his girlfriend, our colleague Eriksson.” Wiklander smiled wryly.
“The other five, then,” said Johansson.
“Three of them seem to have gone home over the weekend. The students living there were mostly from the country,” said Wiklander, who himself was from Värmland and went home to his dear mother in Karlstad whenever he had the chance.
“That leaves two,” said Johansson. “Were they at home?”
“No,” said Wiklander. “They were supposed to have been… wait now, this is how it was. First they were going to go to some concert, but then they didn’t get any tickets, and then they had planned to start partying a little at home before they went out later… but then they got tickets anyway…”
“It wasn’t by any chance our colleague Eriksson who arranged that detail for them?”
“Now that you mention it,” said Wiklander. “I recall that I thought that she must have worked pretty hard to weasel her way in. Although I doubt if she paid-it was probably the firm that did.”
So it was empty in the corridor when Krassner died, thought Johansson. And it was our colleague Eriksson who saw to that. Nothing so complicated.
“What’s the problem?” said Wiklander, looking tentatively at his boss. What is it he’s keeping to himself? he thought.
“No problem at all,” said Johansson, smiling. “Now I have all the pieces in place, many thanks to you, by the way.”
That leaves alternative two, thought Johansson when he’d let Wiklander out after the anticipated quarter hour of coffee-drinking and police chitchat about this and that. Alternative two was not a pleasant alternative. Lunch, thought Johansson, but first a refreshing walk so I can clean out the dross I have in my skull.
The hills of the South End, the water and the city below, were cold and windy with snow in the air; but it could scarcely be more beautiful than this in a person’s life, thought Johansson. Krassner had had his papers at home, the guys at the secret police had made a covert house search. For reasons that Johansson didn’t understand they had taken his papers with them. Then Krassner is supposed to have written his suicide note, with words he’d borrowed from someone else-and on a completely new, unused typewriter ribbon, despite the fact that in all likelihood he already had the same text in his manuscript, all ready and written out, and despite the fact that in all likelihood he ought to have typed many thousand keystrokes during the time he’d been here. And no used typewriter ribbon in the wastebasket either, despite the fact that cleaning was hardly his strongest suit.
Something must have gone completely to hell, thought Johansson while a cold hand brushed against his heart. He considered it out of the question that a Swedish secret police officer would have murdered Krassner in cold blood and feigned a suicide. That just doesn’t happen, thought Johansson. We’re talking about Sweden, for God’s sake. And considering who Krassner was out to get in his book, and if it was really SePo that grabbed his papers, it was a complete mystery why his manuscript wasn’t already in circulation as a best-selling news item in all of the media, thought Johansson with a certain heat. There must be another explanation, and the only one he himself could imagine was that one or more of the operatives who carried out the operation itself had made such an awful mess of things that a feigned suicide was the only solution at hand.
That would explain the silence in the media. It wasn’t out of solicitude for the person that Krassner was out to get in his book, it was about their own rear ends. That would also explain the considerable dexterity required to transform the murder of Krassner into a suicide. Wonder who their chief operative was, thought Johansson. Jeanette Eriksson was out of the question. This he realized from the pictures he’d seen-and besides, she had an alibi. M’Boye. Think how strange it can get, thought Johansson with a wry smile. Besides, she was completely the wrong type.
What do I do now? thought Johansson and sighed. If I talk about what I believe, everyone, including my best friend, will think I’ve gone completely screwy. There’s no one I can ask, and if I trot over to SePo and do so anyway, I’ll be sitting in the parking bureau in Västberga the next day. And I don’t have the least legal basis for even the tiniest bit of surveillance, despite the fact that I’m still the head of the country’s most powerful detective organization. At least on paper.
All I have are my own papers, thought Johansson. For they’re mine and mine alone.
Plus I’m hungry, he thought. Really hungry, the way you get when you’ve already done a whole day’s work in the morning and you still haven’t gotten a bite to put in your stomach. I can take care of that, in any case, thought Johansson, setting a course toward his beloved neighborhood restaurant, where excellent lunches were served even on a normal Monday a week before Christmas.
After lunch Johansson returned to his office, set Krassner’s manuscript and other notes to one side, and instead went through the remaining files. That was how he found the letter that Pilgrim had written to Fionn in April 1955, or more correctly stated, a copy of that letter.
It was a very old copy, certainly not much younger than the letter, on thin, shiny, yellowed photo paper. It was taken with a copying machine from the time when you took a picture with a regular camera firmly mounted onto a copying table, processed the film, and copied the pictures at the desired size.
It was with a number of other, similar copies in an old red cardboard binder that had a white label pasted in the upper-right-hand corner. The label had three lines. On the first someone had written the owner’s name with ink and nib in a neat, old-fashioned handwriting: “Col. John C. Buchanan.” On the line below and in the same handwriting, what was intended to be stored in it: “private notes, letters, etc.” Damp stains that had dried at various times were on the cover, rings from glasses-probably whiskey, thought Johansson with a grin, visualizing the pyramid of bottles in the colonel’s basement.
Pilgrim’s letter to Fionn was handwritten in ink with a fountain pen, the handwriting expressive and aggressively slanted forward, yet completely legible; there was no location and no date. The paper was unlined and folded horizontally in two places with the same distance between the folds, the paper quality unknown but judging by the folds probably high. There was a notation written in ink on the letter in a neat, old-fashioned handwriting, and this with a steel nib as welclass="underline" “April 1955, exact date unknown, arrived during my visit to G.” The colonel, thought Johansson, without knowing why; despite the fact that the lack of an envelope bothered him, he also had an idea that Pilgrim had sent the letter to Fionn’s home address.